The Historicides of Oxford have always feared an extended public and distrusted a name that has been made without their connivance, and which is beyond their reach. I find it difficult to suppose that those who do not realize the incredible narrowness and stupidity of a certain type of history don, will believe the anecdote I am about to tell. Nevertheless, it is true. A pedant, whose name I will not give, was recently heard to refer to Mr. Thomas Hardy in these words, “Hardy? Hardy? Oh, do you mean the little novelist man?”
Let me put it before you quite plainly and in antithesis. Hardly anything could better illustrate the appalling mental position of the camarilla that has got to go. Here is a priggish person, whom no one has ever heard of outside Oxford, piping out his contempt for a man who is generally recognized as one of the most distinguished novelists and one of the chief artists alive in our time.
It is possible that many people will not immediately appreciate the reason for all the terror excited by Mr. Paul’s biography. The outside man cannot quite know how Froude is, and always was, hated and feared by a certain section of the Oxford historians. They were always trying to hit him below the belt because he hit them above the intellect. There was a definite conspiracy among the malignant, from Freeman downwards, to lie about Froude in every conceivable way, and to complete their malicious impudence by calling Froude himself a liar. Froude was a master of English prose; the highest praise that can be given to the jargon which his detractors wrote, and write, is that it is not exactly Esperanto. Froude understood the colour of words, the movements of a paragraph, the harmonic rhythm of an emotion expressed in prose. His words were the incarnation of his original thought, theirs but accentuated their borrowings. While the genius of this great man was coming into its own, while it burned brightly and yet more bright, while all thoughtful England was beginning to be moved and stirred by a new force, and the possessor of it was living with intellects as great and gracious as his own, the Oxford historians slept in their padded rooms, and because they snored loudly imagined they were thinking. Too indolent to search for the truth, they contented themselves with dodging difficulties, and persuading each other that their ostentatious obscurity was fame.
There came a time at last when James Anthony Froude could no longer be ignored. His achievement was beginning to be a national possession, and he shared the councils of the rulers. The echoes of his fame reached the ears of the troglodytes, and, led by Freeman, they swarmed to the attack, yelping a pæan to mediocrity and brandishing weapons from a more than doubtful armoury.
Froude, as Mr. Paul has pointed out, “toiled for months and years over parchments and manuscripts often almost illegible, carefully noting the calligraphy, and among the authors of a joint composition assigning his proper share to each. Freeman wrote his History of the Norman Conquest, upon which he was at this time engaged, entirely from books, without consulting a manuscript or original document of any kind.”
Freeman, – the head of the daguerreotypical historians, – attacked a man whom he very well knew was his superior, pretending publicly to a greater knowledge of the special subject under discussion, and cynically denying any special knowledge in private. In public Freeman represented his hostile attitude as the natural outcome of his zeal for truth; in private it was known that he was actuated by personal hatred, and the discoveries made by Mr. J. B. Rye on the margins of Freeman’s books in Owens College library have discredited him for all time. Again I quote from Mr. Paul’s Life of Froude: —
“Freeman’s biographer, Dean Stephens, preserves absolute and unbroken silence on the duel between Freeman and Froude. I think the Dean’s conduct was judicious. But there is no reason why a biographer of Froude should follow his example. On the contrary, it is absolutely essential that he should not; for Freeman’s assiduous efforts, first in The Saturday, and afterwards in The Contemporary Review, did ultimately produce an impression, never yet fully dispelled, that Froude was an habitual garbler of facts and constitutionally reckless of the truth. But, before I come to details, let me say one word more about Freeman’s qualifications for the task which he so lightly and eagerly undertook. Freeman, with all his self-assertion, was not incapable of candour. He was staunch in friendship, and spoke openly to his friends. To one of them, the excellent Dean Hook, famous for his Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury, he wrote, on the 27th of April, 1857, ‘You have found me out about the sixteenth century. I fancy that from endlessly belabouring Froude, I get credit for knowing more of those times than I do. But one can belabour Froude on a very small amount of knowledge, and you are quite right when you say that I “have never thrown the whole force of my mind on that portion of history.”’ These words pour a flood of light on the temper and knowledge with which Freeman must have entered on what he really seemed to consider a crusade. His object was to belabour Froude. His own acquaintance with the subject was, as he says, ‘very small,’ but sufficient for enabling him to dispose satisfactorily of an historian who had spent years of patient toil in thorough and exhaustive research. On another occasion, also writing to Hook, whom he could not deceive, he said, ‘I find I have a reputation with some people for knowing the sixteenth century, of which I am profoundly ignorant.’ It does not appear to have struck him that he had done his best in The Saturday Review to make people think that, as Froude’s critic, he deserved the reputation which he thus frankly and in private disclaims.
“Another curious piece of evidence has come to light. After Freeman’s death his library was transferred to Owens College, Manchester, and there, among his other books, is his copy of Froude’s History. He once said himself, in reference to his criticism of Froude, ‘In truth there is no kind of temper in the case, but only a strong sense of amusement in bowling down one thing after another.’ Let us see. Here are some extracts from his marginal notes. ‘A lie, teste Stubbs,’ as if Stubbs were an authority, in the proper sense of the term, any more than Froude. Authorities are contemporary witnesses, or original documents. Another entry is ‘Beast,’ and yet another is ‘Bah!’ ‘May I live to embowel James Anthony Froude,’ is the pious aspiration with which he has adorned another page. ‘Can Froude understand honesty?’ asks this anxious inquirer; and again, ‘Supposing Master Froude were set to break stones, feed pigs, or do anything else but write paradoxes, would he not curse his day?’ Along with such graceful compliments as ‘You’ve found that out since you wrote a book against your own father,’ ‘Give him as slave to Thirlwall,’ there may be seen the culminating assertion, ‘Froude is certainly the vilest brute that ever wrote a book.’ Yet there was ‘no kind of temper in the case,’ and ‘only a strong sense of amusement.’ I suppose it must have amused Freeman to call another historian a vile brute. But it is fortunate that there was no temper in the case. For if there had, it would have been a very bad temper indeed.”
Until Mr. Herbert Paul’s Life of Froude appeared a year ago, the Historicides had been continually repeating the lie that Froude garbled documents, was untrustworthy, and wrote not history but fiction. History, of course, often imitates fiction, for good fiction always deals with realities. But these slanderers did not pause for a definition. They continued to abuse Froude, to prevent their pupils from reading him, and to refuse him a place in the recognized curriculum of historical study at the University.
From time to time a doubter or inquirer arose and was promptly suppressed. Nor was it likely that a man, whatever his private opinion of those in authority might be, was going to jeopardize his chance of a good degree by publishing it. There were awkward moments, of course, for the slanderers. A lie is like a forged promissory note. When it becomes due another must be forged in order to take up the first. But the Historicides had the whip-hand. They controlled the examinations, and they could do what they pleased.
I once wrote a little story which I will outline here, because I think it illustrates the method of these people whenever any ugly fact was discovered and some one required an explanation.
There was once a simple-minded old gentleman of a philosophic temper and an inquiring mind. Blessed with an ample fortune and untroubled by any business instincts, he devoted his life to the search for truth. On the whole his life was a happy one, because he possessed the faculty of going on. His failures were not made tragic with courage, but were minimized by persistence, and so were not very different from successes. Yet, as the years went on, he began to feel that in his time he would never achieve his end. Seeing him somewhat downcast, and becoming indifferent to his chop and Chambertin, his butler, a faithful person, came to him one day, and, after venturing a privileged remonstrance, stated that he had something to disclose. “I have lately heard, sir,” said the butler, “that truth is really hidden at the bottom of a well. It may of course, sir, be mere idle talk, but I think, as far as I remember, we have not looked there yet? There was the church, sir – we found nothing there – and then I held the lantern for you in the chapel, too. There was none behind the art wall-paper, nor did Liberty have any in stock. And it wasn’t in history, sir, because I turned over every leaf of them Oxford books myself, and shook them well, too. You did think you’d found it in science, sir, I remember, there was something that you thought was truth in the bottom of the test-tube, but then you told me it wasn’t, though I forget what you said it was after all.”
“Merely a note of a recorded fact, Thomas,” said the old gentleman sorrowfully. “But do you really think there is anything in this idea of yours?”
“I cannot be positive, sir,” the butler replied; “but I see it stated definite at the end of a leading article in the Artesian Engineer.”
“Have we a well on the premises, Thomas?” the old gentleman asked, putting on his spectacles and rubbing his hands briskly together.
“I asked the gardener this morning, sir,” Thomas answered, “and he informs me that there is an old disused well by the cucumber-frame which could be opened easily enough by a couple of men working for a week.”
“Engage some men at once,” said the old gentleman, now thoroughly interested and pleased, and that day he enjoyed his chop with all his accustomed pleasure. The faithful butler, who had all his life lived worthily and well without truth, was overjoyed at the success of his suggestion. Anticipating, however, another disappointment, he gave private instructions, received con amore by the workmen, that they were not to hurry over their task of opening the well, and for a month the old gentleman’s appetite whetted by hope, was all that his faithful retainer could desire.
At length the work was done, the well was fully opened, and the page-boy (an adventurous youth) descended in the bucket. There was a tense silence in the garden as the boy disappeared, until his hollow-sounding voice hailed them from below vibrating with excitement.
“I’ve got un, sir,” ascended in a triumphant pipe; “he be here, sir, sure ’nuff!”
In a moment more the young fellow came to the surface, holding a large and speckled toad in his hand. On the back of the reptile an arrangement of orange-coloured spots spelt out the word TRUTH.
The old gentleman saw it, fell into uncontrollable rage, snatched the wondering reptile from the page-boy’s hand and stamped out its life upon the ground.
“To the house all of you,” he cried; “and never let me hear the name of truth again!” With that he forswore all his former theories, and in bitter irony started a society paper. However, the gardener, a wise, silent, and pawky person, came along later, and, picking a diamond from the crushed débris of the toad took it home and hid it away for the rest of his life, fearing discovery. When the gardener died, his relatives discovered the jewel, and knowing nothing of its value threw it away.
The old gentleman made an enormous fortune out of the society paper.
Forgive the digression. This, or something like it, was what the Historicides of Oxford did before the publication of Mr. Paul’s book. Whenever any one showed them the truth they snatched it from him, and ordered him back into Stubbs’s Charters.
I have already said something of the terror the Life of Froude excited. In a swift moment pretensions were exposed, lies were shown to be lies, and people began to read Froude. Mr. Paul made it quite plain that the accusations of dishonesty against Froude were utter fabrications. Mr. Paul, himself a learned historian, an artist and a man of letters, has gone into the charges seriatim, and triumphantly disproved them. No one can ever make them again. They are lies, they have been proved once and for ever to be lies. I cannot quote here the mass of refutation which has brought about the complete vindication of the accused historian. This is a summary and nothing more. It stands for all to read in Mr. Paul’s book, a volume which should be in the hands of every man who is reading, and means to read history at Oxford.
This memorable book is a protest against the charlatanry of the pseudo-scientific school of history. The acts and intentions of people in the past cannot be known better than the intentions and acts of people in the present. No one man can possibly sift all, or anything like all the evidence for any period. Much of the important evidence is missing. No one can be examined or cross-examined, and for an historian to write as if he were a judge delivering a decision is a piece of impertinence. The abler man, assuming his honesty, will make the abler historian, and the mere bookworm is not the best judge of what probably happened. It is the dull and incompetent who formerly invented the fable that brilliant writers are superficial. This is the lie behind which the “dry as dusts” have lurked for years; it was their last line of defence, and Mr. Paul has destroyed it.
The historian must be able to write distinguished English, and he must understand the enormous possibilities of his medium. He must add a sense of artistry to his scholarship. He must be a man of experience in human event, a man who has done and suffered; must have been in crowds and seen “how madly men can care about nothings,” and he must disabuse his mind of formula and theory before he begins to write. Sir Arthur Helps said this years ago: —
“To make themselves historians, they should also have considered the combinations among men and the laws that govern such things; for there are laws. Moreover our historians, like most men who do great things, must combine in themselves qualities which are held to belong to opposite natures; must at the same time be patient in research and vigorous in imagination, energetic and calm, cautious and enterprising.”
History, in short, is the complement of poetry, and with this definition as a basis let us proceed to examine some of the Oxford historians of to-day. But first let me recapitulate the points at which we have so far arrived.
I have endeavoured to make plain, that —
(a) The Oxford historians of the moment enjoy an unjust monopoly, and exercise a disastrous power of veto.
(b) That the power to stop all this, to force these people to their duty or to send them about their business lies with the majority.
(c) That the majority is composed of those who pay for the education of their sons, and of those who proceed to the University for an education.
(d) That the historian must be not only a scholar, but an artist and man of letters also.
(e) That the fear of Froude provoked the attack on him in the past, and has maintained it until a year ago.
(f) That Mr. Paul’s Life of Froude has silenced the misstatements of mediocrity and incompetence for ever.
The whole business of Froude has provided one with a lens in which to focus the question upon the page, and no one was ever provided with a better text than I have been. Excuse me, however, if I make a brief personal explanation. While engaged upon this piece of work an Oxford man, an old-fashioned High Churchman of the Freeman type, has been staying with me. It is forty years since he was in residence, and he did not see with me at all in this matter when we discussed it.
“I cannot understand,” he said, “how you are going to champion Froude and Mr. Paul against Freeman, who was perfectly sound on Church matters, as I believe you to be. All you have ever published has been in support of Catholic Truth, and yet you are earnestly advocating a historian who was the incarnation of Protestantism.”
It was, in the first place, difficult to make my interlocutor see that I was writing of the art of the historian, and not the trend of his opinions. In the second place, I do not agree with him as to the essential Protestantism of Froude. Froude’s religious attitude has been summed up once and for all by one of the most brilliant writers of our time, an historian, artist, and scholar, whom Oxford dons rejected, but for whom Oxford calls aloud, and for whom St. Stephen’s has naturally a greater attraction – much as one deplores it.
Mr. Belloc writes: —
“See how definite, how downright, and how clean are the sentences in which Froude asserts that Christianity is Catholic or nothing: —
“‘… This was the body of death which philosophy detected but could not explain, and from which Catholicism now came forward with its magnificent promise of deliverance.
“‘The carnal doctrine of the sacraments, which they are compelled to acknowledge to have been taught as fully in the early Church as it is now taught by the Roman Catholics, has long been the stumbling-block to Protestants. It was the very essence of Christianity itself. Unless the body could be purified, the soul could not be saved; or, rather, as from the beginning, soul and flesh were one man and inseparable, without his flesh, man was lost, or would cease to be. But the natural organization of the flesh was infected, and unless organization could begin again from a new original, no pure material substance could exist at all. He, therefore, by whom God had first made the world, entered into the womb of the Virgin in the form (so to speak) of a new organic cell, and around it, through the virtue of His creative energy, a material body grew again of the substance of His mother, pure of taint and clean as the first body of the first man when it passed out under His hand in the beginning of all things.’
“Throughout his essay on the Philosophy of Christianity, where he was maintaining a thesis odious to the majority of his readers, he rings as hard as ever. The philosophy of Christianity is frankly declared to be Catholicism and Catholicism alone; the truth of Christianity is denied. It is called a thing ‘worn and old’ even in Luther’s time, and he definitely prophesies a period when ‘our posterity’ shall learn to ‘despise the miserable fabric which Luther stitched together out of its tatters.’”
I can add nothing to Mr. Belloc’s criticism or his quotations.
Let us now take a survey of the history which the powers that be in Oxford have substituted for the work of Froude. Let us shake the upas-trees which shadow the quadrangle of the Schools and wonder how these astonishing vegetables have managed to produce such fruit as that of which I have to set samples before you.
The Examination Statutes in the section containing the regulations for the Honour School of Modern History recommend, among other books, that candidates who take the period 1559-1715 should study Gustavus Adolphus, by Mr. C. R. L. Fletcher, M.A., late Fellow of All Souls’ College, Oxford. The gentlemen who compile the Examination Statutes would “recommend” almost anything, but I imagine that I am about to astonish the general reader.
I will begin with Mr. Fletcher’s preface. He himself says in the very first line that his book “demands little preface.” It would have been perhaps better for him had he been guided by his own pious opinion and resisted the temptation to print his confessions in nine closely-printed pages. I say “confessions” advisedly, for rarely in the course of a wide experience of books have I set eyes upon a more candid and almost disarming statement than the one before me here.
In his preface Mr. Fletcher asserts that his book —
(1) “Makes no pretensions to be based upon original research,” and he follows up this curious admission with …
(2) “And I cannot claim to have read even all the modern authorities on the subject.”
And (3) “My knowledge of the Swedish language is by no means independent of the assistance of a dictionary, nor can I hope to have escaped that tendency to partiality for which the natural fascination of such a subject is the only excuse.”
Mr. Fletcher then proceeds to tell us that he was
(4) “Obliged to include accounts of many things of which I had made no special study. The military history of the Thirty Years’ War is in itself a case in point. No satisfactory monograph on the subject exists, and I have often been obliged to confess myself at fault in grasping the exact meaning of military terms, and the exact effect of manœuvres, in an art of which even in its modern shape I know nothing.
(5) “But the times have so far changed,” he continues, “that I am able to plead that I am probably not much more ignorant of the art of war than the majority of my readers are likely to be.
(6) “In those archives” (the archives of Stockholm), “if anywhere, it is probable that the true Gustavus Adolphus is to be found.” But
(7) He, Mr. Fletcher, “is a man who has no pretension to be a student of archives.”
Here, then, we have an historian who admits that even the little he has to offer is borrowed from the books of other people. He has not taken the trouble to search and inquire for himself, and, content with profiting by the labours of others more conscientious, he has of course been unable to verify the accuracy of such labours. Nor has he even taken the trouble to borrow from the latest sources, for he informs us, “and I cannot claim to have read even all the modern authorities on the subject.”
Mr. Fletcher does not thoroughly know the language of the country of which he writes; he has included accounts of many things “of which I had made no special study” in this precious book; and finally, the historian of the Victor of Breitenfeld and Lützen knows absolutely nothing of military history, the art of war, or the meaning of military terms, in spite of which, at page 119, he declares (a) that Gustavus was “certainly a greater master of tactics than Wallenstein,” but “not a greater cavalry captain than Pappenheim;” and (b) “that Pappenheim had not the coup d’œil which enables a man to grasp a whole battle at once.”
How a man can dare to print such a cataract of admissions I do not understand. At any rate, tested by the lowest standard, treated with the utmost leniency, his book stands self-confessed as worthless. However modest the author’s estimate of his work and the humility of Heep was as nothing to the assumption of this preface, the book cannot under any conceivable circumstances be of the least use to the student. It outrages every canon by which the most amateur of historians should guide himself to write.
Yet this book is recommended in the Examination Statutes to be read by men wishing to take Honours in History while the works of James Anthony Froude are rigidly excluded.
I would fain linger a little longer with Mr. Fletcher, possibly one of the richest unconscious humourists who have ever written history. He deserves to be known to a wider circle than the mere academic. In these drab, hurried days, anything that makes for innocent gaiety is to be welcomed. I think it was Ruskin who said that Edwin Lear’s Book of Nonsense was one of the most valuable books ever written. It is a pity that Mr. Ruskin did not live to read Mr. Fletcher’s other work, An Introductory History of England.
